Tombstoning by Doug Johnstone

Your best mate just fell off a cliff in mysterious circumstances
and you were the last person to see him alive, what do you do? Well, if you're
David Lindsay from Arbroath,
you get the hell out of there and don't return. Not for at least fifteen years.
Until Nicola Cruickshank, yes, that Nicola, the girl you always fancied but
never had the guts to approach, gets in touch and asks, no, demands, that you
go back for a school reunion. To the place where it happened. The place you've
been running from for fifteen years.

Of course you go. Not to belatedly lay your mate to rest, but
because you still fancy Nicola. The thing is, if you are David Lindsay, then
returning to Arbroath isn't
going to lay any ghosts to rest. And when someone else takes a dive off the
cliffs while David's there, an act the locals have taken to calling
tombstoning, he has a choice: run away again, or
finally find out why people keep dying around him...

Doug Johnstone's first novel moves along at an engaging pace, and
you find yourself becoming increasingly involved with the two main characters,
David and Nicola, as they in turn become increasingly involved with each other.
Meanwhile, events build towards a climax that has a sense of inevitability
about it but nonetheless succeeds in being genuinely exciting. And in the
background you become drawn into some perennial Scottish issues about small
towns and the people who grow up in them, the people who leave them, and what
it's like to return.